CHAPTER 9
Admiral Richard Donchez lit his first Havana of the day, ignoring the pained expression on Captain Fred Rummel’s face. Rummel, the SUBLANT Chief Intelligence Officer, had called Donchez to the Top Secret Conference Room for an urgent brief. Donchez had been in the office before the sun to work on plans for a Stingray monument. The memorial had been kicking up objections from Naval Intelligence, which wanted the entire affair forgotten.
“Sir,” Rummel began, “CIA PHOTOINT sent us this.” The room lights dimmed and a slide projector clicked on to show a view of the Kola Peninsula on the Russian north coast. Most of the countryside was a cool blue, while bright orange dots lit up half a dozen points on the coastline.
“Infrared,” Rummel said. “Blue is cold, orange is hot. As you can plainly see, we’re getting hot spots at the submarine bases of the Northern Fleet along Russia’s northern coast.” Donchez nodded. “Power plants, buildings with poor insulation, floodlights. Lots of thermal sources.”
“Right. That’s why it took a few hours for us to get around to looking at this.” The slide changed to a closer view of one of the submarine bases. Donchez stood up slowly. “Oh shit,” he said softly, dropping cigar ashes into the carpeting.
“Indeed, sir. As you can see, each of the twenty-five submarines here has an orange spot showing mid-length in her hull. Those thermal traces are reactor cores. They look like that when they’re critical, making power, but also when they’re shut down. But look aft of each reactor. The steam lines inside the turbine rooms are also glowing. These submarines are all hot, the reactors are critical. They’re making steam.” Rummel now clicked the control on the slide projector and the machine ran through a dozen similar shots, each a different Kola Peninsula base, each showing nuclear submarines with reactors and engine rooms hot.
A knock came at the door and a petty officer looked in at Rummel, handed him a sealed envelope lined with a red banner and quickly left.
“How old are those photos?” Donchez asked.
“Three hours, sir.”
“We need to see what’s happening now.”
Rummel opened the envelope. “This is hot off the TS fax machine, sir.” He pulled out a long strip of paper with the same kinds of coloring as the slides. Donchez turned up the room lights as Rummel spread the fax out from one end of the long table to the other— every fourteen inches was a photo of a submarine base. Donchez looked from one photo to the next.
“They’re gone. Every god damned one of them.”
Rummel nodded, face tight. Each photo showed the same bases as the three-hour-old shots, but in the new photos the piers were empty.
“How many attack subs are in their Northern Fleet?”
“One hundred twenty, sir.”
“Any in dock for repair?”
“No, sir. Not one.”
“Any activity out of Vladivostok?”
“No, sir. The Pacific Fleet is dead quiet. Almost all their submarines are in port, shut down, getting routine maintenance. This activity is altogether confined to the Northern Fleet.”
Donchez sat back down in his seat while Rummel folded up the fax. The cigar’s tip had gone cold. “Get SOSUS on NESTOR,” he ordered, referring to the secure UHF radio telephone to the Sound Surveillance System Control Room on the eastern shore of Maryland, the receiving and analysis point for the ten thousand miles of U.S. sonar-array cables laid on the Atlantic.
In the two minutes it took to get the SOSUS duty officer on the line, Donchez had summoned his own duty officer to the conference room.
“SOSUS CONTROL ROOM. DUTY OFFICER,” the speaker rasped out to the room. Donchez nodded at Rummel.
“SOSUS, this is SUBLANT. Report any detects in the North Atlantic and Barents Sea that are new within the last three hours. Over.”
“SUBLANT, SOSUS. SORRY FOR THE DELAY — THERE SHOULD BE AN IMMEDIATE MESSAGE COMING OVER YOUR UHF SATELLITE NETWORK NOW. WE HAVE MULTIPLE SONAR DETECTS, TOO MANY TO DISTINGUISH. CONTACTS SEEM TO BE WARSHIPS WITH SUBMARINE-TYPE SCREW PATTERNS. BEARINGS GENERALLY CORRELATE TO THE NORTH ATLANTIC AND REGIONS IN VICINITY OF KOLA PENINSULA AND NOVAYA ZEMLYA. OVER.”
Rummel acknowledged and broke the connection. Donchez turned to the SUBLANT duty officer.
“Assemble my staff in this conference room, then get on NESTOR to CINCLANTFLEET and tell Admiral McGee I’ll be briefing him in a half hour.”
The Duty Officer left in a hurry.
“What do you think, Rummel?” Donchez asked, pulling his Piranha lighter from his jacket pocket to relight his dead cigar.
“A deployment exercise… what else? Things are pretty cozy between us and them these days…”
Donchez pointed to the fax photographs. “Does that look cozy? Get on the horn with Langley and ask about the Russian SSN-X-27 cruise missiles’ status. Put the same question to OP Oh Nineteen at the Pentagon. I want to know if these attack subs are loaded with anything that could be tossed at us. Cozy, my ass.”
Rummel took off without a word. Donchez watched the smoke from the Havana rise toward the ceiling, and wondered what in hell Admiral Alexi Novskoyy was up to now.
Captain Vlasenko knocked on the door to his commandeered stateroom. It was time to take back the ship.
Novskoyy called out, “Who is it?”
“Captain Vlasenko, sir.”
Through the door Vlasenko heard the rustling of papers, the sound of books being shuffled and the safe door being shut. Finally the door mechanism clicked as it was unlocked. The door opened and Vlasenko saw Novskoyy’s back as the admiral returned to his seat at his desk. The desk’s papers and books had been covered by a chart, laid blank side up, revealing only the TOP SECRET stamps on its blank wide surface.
“What can I do for you, Captain?” The glance at the stateroom had momentarily thrown Vlasenko off balance.
“Sir, I had wanted to talk to you about, well, about what you are doing aboard. You’ve practically taken over this ship, aborting my sea-trials agenda without letting me brief the crew on what we’re doing, giving direct orders to my officers, threatening my Security Warrant Officer, transmitting messages from my control compartment without my signature, assigning maintenance schedules to the Communications Officer. Sir, I am the captain of this vessel, these orders should come through me…”
He had run out of steam, and was furious with himself. It sounded like a plea for Novskoyy to give him back the ship please? sir?
Novskoyy seemed to have barely heard. “Whatever you like, Vlasenko. Now you’ll excuse me, I have some matters to attend to. By the way, I’ve instructed the Deck Officer to use the topsounder and find the nearest polynya. We will be surfacing as soon as there is thin ice overhead.”
Vlasenko stared. What was Novskoyy doing? An order to surface along with his demand that the radio sets be fully functional…? Vlasenko started to protest but Novskoyy cut him off.
“Captain, shut the door behind you and set the lock, if you please.”
He hadn’t so much as looked at Vlasenko’s face as he said it, his eyes focused on the far bulkhead. Without further word the admiral began to unlock his safe again as Vlasenko moved out, locking the stateroom door behind him.
In his stateroom Vlasenko again thought of the spare key to the captain’s — Novskoyy’s — stateroom. It was in the First Officer’s safe, and the combination was set so that it would be easy to remember — his graduation date from the Marshal Grechko Higher Naval School of Underwater Navigation: right to zero five, left twice to twenty-eight, right again to sixty-eight.